When HP CEO Carly Fiorina was asked recently to describe the next big thing for the technology industry in the next three to five years, she responded: "It's about connection, reliability, lower cost, increased flexibility, lower risk, security, scalability and simplicity."
Her litany for the next big thing provides IT executives with all the comforting buzzwords. It's the de rigueur menu of preferred items. If you blended them together, you would have the magic IT elixir--all the essential ingredients to maximize your investment in IT and become an agile, organic, on-demand, adaptive, real-time, customer-centric enterprise, complete with dominant market share.
The problem is those words merely describe properties and values to which IT aspires, but aren't solutions in themselves. They are menu items for which no single recipe exists, except from companies that want to sell you snake oil to increase flexibility or provide a more secure environment.
The question is: How do you realize those attributes, beyond paying a consultant firm millions to tell you how you can stop worrying and learn to love IT?
Every company aspires to be connected, for example. You want to create a collaborative environment that connects management, employees, customers and suppliers. You want to provide the appropriate data and tools from across heterogeneous systems to a variety of users. Or, you are in a fast moving industry, and flexibility is critical. You want to be able to change a business process without complicated, major surgery or scale up your CPU and storage capacity to meet a peak demand.
IT organizations are taking a variety of approaches to deal with these challenges. There is no magic elixir, but one fundamental building block stands out: standards-based computing.
For several years, standards-based technologies have been driving down the cost of systems. Unless you have been stranded on a desert island without a satellite phone, you know that the last few years of economic slumping have pushed IT organizations to move away from more proprietary platforms and adopt standards-based systems from the desktop to the data center.
The costs for deployment, integration, maintenance, training and administration are lower than for the more proprietary systems. Standards-based systems tend to be reliable, given the gauntlet any software or hardware must survive to be recognized as a standard. A desktop PC or blade server today is cheaper and far more reliable than previous generations, but isn't going to be as reliable or capable as a million dollar mainframe at transaction processing.
With more choice and availability--in the server, storage, and network switch marketplaces, for example--IT buyers have a better negotiating position. Spreading an infrastructure across multiple locations, partners, or supply chains becomes much simpler in a standards-based world. In addition, rather than expending precious resources to maintain legacy systems, the people and budget can be applied to innovating on top of the standards-based platforms.
Of course, not every platform or product that calls itself "standards-based" can be trusted to comply with officially ratified or de facto standards. Standards come in many flavors, and can sometimes clash with one another. For starters, a standard is not just what the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) promote as standard protocols. Often, the marketplace or the will of a few behemoths like IBM and Microsoft, rather than technical superiority, dictates what a standard is.
The Intel standard, for example, is driven by the chipmaker's dominant market share. Intel even has significant penetration of the high performance computing space. The list of the world's 500 most powerful computers released last month included 119 Intel-based systems, more than double from six months ago. Similarly, Microsoft Windows is a standard due to its broad influence in the marketplace.
Their proprietary architectures cover a vast part of the IT landscape, but they are standard reference platforms for millions of developers. While Microsoft maintains its proprietary file formats, for example, they are not completely closed off from the rest of the world. OpenOffice.org is able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. Microsoft and the rest of the world are embracing XML as a standard document format, which will provide even more openness and capabilities down the road.
More important is the collection of "open" standards--such as Ethernet, 802.11g, HTML, and SMTP--which provide a common foundation across different platforms and vendors. Web services standards are also emerging as a vehicle to reinvent software interoperability around a service-oriented architecture. Despite the fact many of the standards are driven by the behemoths, such as IBM and Microsoft, Web services should enable applications or components from multiple vendors to interoperate.
There are also the open source standards, which are based on the royalty-free deployment of commercially viable and modifiable source code. Java relies on a regulated community process to establish standards for the language. However, both Java and open source software--such as Linux, Apache, Gnome, FreeBSD, Jboss and MySQL--rely on open standards like HTTP, SMTP, SQL and others.
The importance of standards in brewing the magic IT elixir doesn't mean that every proprietary platform is a candidate for extinction. For many specialized applications and industries, they fill a unique need. But, you should evaluate the costs to maintain those aging systems as part of an IT ecosystem versus migrating to a more standards-based platform. As some point those systems will become more of a liability than a tried and true way of supporting the business.
What's your recipe for the magic IT elixir? Use TalkBack to let your fellow ZDNet readers know what you think. Or write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.
